I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

Unto you is bornin the city of Davida Savior for all.

If you can quit, quit. If you can't quit, stop complaining - this is what you chose.

If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

You may be on land, yet not in a garden.

If people don't like your work, all the still pictures in the world can't help you and nothing written about you, even oceans of it, will make you popular.

Life never stops. The torment of men will be eternal, unless the function of creating and acting and changing, living intensely through each day, be considered an eternal joy.

I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.

I approach a comedy the same way I do a drama. I try to make it as real as possible.